Kitchen Literacy: The Perfect Read For a Retrovore

The subtitle of Ann Vileisis’s Kitchen Literacy says it all: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back. Vileisis, a historian who also happens to be a passionate cook and gardener, documents the American diet’s evolution from an era when we were all locavores by necessity to the over-processed predicament that industrial agriculture’s boxed us into now.

Vileisis whisks us back to the late eighteenth century via the diaries of a woman named Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine who grew most of her family’s food, made her own bread, butter, and cheese, and took for granted such unappetizing tasks as twisting the neck of a turkey. Ballard’s detailed notes about her vegetable garden, the animals she raised or bartered for, and the meals she made of them, evoke a connection to land and livestock that most of us couldn’t imagine today.

That we abandoned an agrarian way of life ages ago and wound up outsourcing the production of our food to a bunch of businessmen hell bent on fattening us up like feedlot cattle is not news. What’s fresh--and fascinating--about Kitchen Literacy is Vileisis’s thorough account of the factors behind this terrible transition.

Food manufacturers were already extolling the virtues of processed food products by the late nineteenth century, but wary women resisted the shift from fresh foods they could see, touch, and smell to mysterious canned goods “with their distinctly concealing tin armor.”

Their worst fears were confirmed by canned goods whose contents turned out to be adulterated, rotted or toxic. In 1874, a reporter for the Chicago Times took a batch of brand-name canned and packaged foods to a high school chemistry teacher’s lab for analysis and discovered that much of it contained sawdust. Food manufacturers struggled to perfect their canning methods and created all kinds of hazards in the process: toxic metals that were used to seal lids leached into the contents; fruits and vegetables lacking that “fresh-picked” look had their color “enhanced” by bleach additives and coal-tar dyes; putrefied molasses that exploded when opened, and so on.

How the food producers survived this rocky start and gradually won over skeptical shoppers is a study in marketing, and Vileisis provides some great graphics and ad copy to show how this was accomplished. A 1919 ad touting the virtues of Del Monte’s canned fruits and vegetables manages to offend Ethicurean sensibilities on two fronts at once: “The DEL MONTE can is a magic container that annihilates distance and merges all seasons into one long fruitful summer.” So much for counting your food miles and eating seasonally.

Another ad from Carnation Milk circa 1913 depicted “contented cows” grazing on “green grass the year round on the North Pacific Coast”--an uncanny precursor to Horizon’s “happy cows.” Like Horizon, whose certified organic status has been the subject of much controversy, Carnation turned out to be keeping its cows in somewhat less idyllic conditions than the “verdant pastures interlaced by sparkling streams and backed by the snow-capped mountains that showed up in the ads,” Vileisis writes.

The ads aroused the suspicion of Dr. Harvey Wiley, a chemist who was instrumental in passing the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and had served as chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry (predecessor to the FDA). When Wiley attempted to verify Carnation’s claims, he discovered that the company had no herds of its own, but relied instead on two hundred dairy farmers from various parts of the country “who, as far as Wiley could tell, hauled their milk with no particular attention to sanitation. When he visited one nearby farm, he saw cows “so plastered with manure…so upholstered with filth” that he could “hardly tell their color.””

Another all-too-familiar scenario is the FDA’s recurring role as agribiz ally, repeatedly coddling food industry titans at the expense of consumers. Vileisis documents the rapid rise of DDT as a pesticide after World War II and cites evidence that the health hazards of DDT were obvious to FDA researchers, farmers, and others for decades before the EPA finally moved to ban it in 1972 after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring publicized the problem.

Vilesis describes the “covenant of ignorance” that allowed consumers to blithely buy all kinds of dubious food products:

Michael Pollan targets this same don’t-wanna-know mindset in the “How to Eat” passage of his new book, In Defense of Food. In entreating us to eat slowly and deliberately, Pollan explains why ignorance is essential to the enjoyment of fast-food:

Kitchen Literacy is, in fact, the perfect book for anyone who appreciates Pollan’s work but longs for a more in-depth study of how our food chain got so twisted in the first place. In the book’s final chapters, Vileisis cites the rise of farmers’ markets, CSAs, and consumer demand for organic foods as indications that the tide is finally turning and Americans are beginning to rethink our dysfunctional food system:

Vileisis’s proposed cures for our warped culinary culture echo those of Pollan and all the other activist foodies: buy local and organic if you can, eat seasonally, avoid processed foods and factory farm meats and dairy, and take an interest in our government’s agricultural and environmental policies.

But Kitchen Literacy offers more than the by-now familiar road map for retrovores who want to know where and how their food is grown. At a time when Americans are so starved for insight about how to eat that In Defense of Food is already #7 on Amazon in its first week, Kitchen Literacy provides a cautionary culinary tale of how we got so far off the eaten path in the first place.